The Simple Con and the Hoodwinking of America

The term “Hoodwink” reflects an obsolete meaning of “wink.” Today, “to wink” means to close one eye briefly, but during the 1500s it meant to shut both eyes firmly. So, a highwayman who placed a hood over a victim's eyes to effectively close them, was said to “hoodwink” his prey, and soon “hoodwink” came to mean “to dupe.” If you have been hoodwinked it means you were deceived while being robbed or deprived of something.

The hoodwinking of America is simple. Politicians will tell you they support something you agree with, tell you they would never do anything to take it away, then vote to take it away. They will do this and then deny that they ever supported the bill. Their simple con logic is that people will believe what they want to hear, and once committed, they will deny all evidence to the contrary.

In the current Big Billionaire Bonus Bill wending its way into law, Donald Trump and dozens of Republicans promised to never touch Medicare or Medicaid. They then drafted a bill to do just that, all while still promising they wouldn’t touch those things. To be even more deceitful, they made it so that the damaging effects of their actions wouldn’t take place until after the mid-term elections. They will continue to lie to their constituents and tell them they hate such provisions in the bill while still voting the bill into law.

They will throw a bone to lower-income folks with a less than one-percent tax break that will go away in the coming years. They will do this while enacting huge tax breaks for big corporations and the very wealthy that have no such sunset provision. They offer a bowl of stale pretzels to the common folk while they are preparing to sit down to a six-course feast with drinks and desert paid with your tax dollars. They don’t even bother to promise that some of their largess will “trickle down” to the thirsty at the bottom. Everyone knows that “trickle” dried up during the Reagan administration.

To sum up the Big Billionaire Bonus Bill, the rich get a lasting tax break, the poor get a tiny break that expires and will be wiped out with a higher cost of surviving (we can’t call it living), and the president gets his police state army. The icing on this tasty treat is that we will be $3.3T further in debt.

Republicans are arguing that their big tax breaks shouldn’t be counted with their logic being that they are merely extending an existing tax break that was due to expire. By that logic, if I pay off my home mortgage and the bank demands I continue sending them checks, I should do this because it “won’t cost me anything?” Talk about your “magic math.”